Bootstrapping to $20 Million with Intelligent Financial Engineering: Tim Hentschel, CEO of Hotelplanner.com (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Given that the market is $45 billion, there’s obviously a huge amount of head room to build a larger business here. Could you have grown a lot faster? Are there levers that you could push? I’m not saying that you should grow faster. I’m asking out of intellectual curiosity. Tim Hentschel: There definitely

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Entrepreneurship in Utah: Blackrock CEO Andy Gotshalk (Part 2)

Andy Gotshalk: I also started taking some classes and thought about the idea of going to business school full-time. I never went back to business school so to this day, I still don’t have an MBA. I did take some key classes along the way, which provided a good foundation for me. The biggest thing

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Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You started this in 2000? Joe Speiser: We started the deal sites in early 1999. Sramana Mitra: This was bootstrapped at that point? Joe Speiser: Yes, there were no VCs. These businesses were profitable in the first few months. If we weren’t able to make money in the first few months, we’d move

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Bootstrapping to $20 Million with Intelligent Financial Engineering: Tim Hentschel, CEO of Hotelplanner.com (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What do you want to do? Is this something that you are going to accelerate by taking outside capital or do you want to remain an employee-owned organization? Tim Hentschel: Debt is so cheap. It’s 3% to 4%. People get excited about the private equity money out there. I agree that it has

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Thursday, May 21 – 260th 1M/1M Mentoring Roundtable For Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 260th FREE online 1M/1M roundtable mentoring session on Thursday, May 21, 2015, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur, register to “pitch” and sell your business idea to Sramana Mitra. You’ll gain straightforward feedback, advice on next steps, and she’ll answer any

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Entrepreneurship in Utah: Blackrock CEO Andy Gotshalk (Part 1)

We have covered quite a few Utah companies already like Pluralsight, InsideSales, and Steals.com. Here is another interesting entrepreneurial story out of the mini tech startup hub in Utah. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

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Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things (Part 1)

Joe bootstrapped his first digital media/ad network business to $50 million in revenue and then sold it to private equity. Later he started a second business, an e-commerce company, that he bootstrapped for a year and then raised venture capital. His third business is a spin-off within the second business that takes him back to

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Develop a Point of View, Write Regularly

Last year, I wrote If I Were 22: I Was Fired From My Own Company. If you haven’t read that piece, I suggest you do. For this year’s graduating class, I have a suggestion.